


A Shrill Demented Choir

by diopan



Category: Berserk (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29943270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diopan/pseuds/diopan
Summary: “Expecting him, are ya?”Griffith says nothing, he looks beyond the horizon.You know ya can’t both win,” Zodd too looks ahead, his figure hunched so his face will be closer to Griffith atop his horse. “It’s inevitable. Your fate is.”Griffith wants to say that he’ll see about that, that he has once before upset his fate, taken his kingdom, left behind the child in the backstreets of a slum town.
Relationships: Griffith/Guts (Berserk)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	A Shrill Demented Choir

**Author's Note:**

> thank u notelini im sorry for the delay
> 
> for notelin’s friend komahinas on twitter

Griffith stands on the highest mountain in Falconia.

In the distance, he can see the spirits of the dead rising out of the earth, walking slowly and clumsily towards the gates of the city.

Beneath his feet, the Earth trembles, soft and humid, and a ripple from where he stands all the way down to where the spirits are about to reach the entrance tears off the base of the gates, the spears twisting upwards and bending forward, leaving a pathway open for all the dead and no way out for all the living.

The structures of the city crumble into ash and salt, piles that burn the skins of living beings and signals the path of dead ones.

Griffith watches over the march of the dead and stupidly he looks back on his previous sacrifice. How fickle, to be human.

(One giant eye opened in darkness)

(One giant eye opened in the darkness and focused its dilated pupil on Griffith’s form, the only light)

  
  


-

  
  
  


“Expecting him, are ya?”

Griffith says nothing, he looks beyond the horizon.

Behind him, his army stands at attention, expectant. Behind him, the city and the citizens of Falconia gather their hands in silent prayer. The Black Swordsman, that rabid dog, has finally reached the edges of the hill and brings with him the murdering sorcerers he’s gathered in his pilgrimage.

“You know ya can’t both win,” Zodd too looks ahead, his figure hunched so his face will be closer to Griffith atop his horse. “It’s inevitable. Your fate is.”

Griffith wants to say that he’ll see about that, that he has once before upset his fate, taken his kingdom, left behind the child in the backstreets of a slum town. 

Instead, he says nothing.

For a time now he’s been dreaming of the arrival. He watches over the two of them and their companions as they make their way towards Falconia and sometimes he can’t distinguish anyone’s face but his.

Sometimes he can’t distinguish this dream from the one they shared before Guts abandoned him for a better fate.

There was none of that at the hill where Rickert placed all those swords to signal the death of his first Band of the Hawks, their dreams merged into his own. 

There was nothing there when Griffith saw him on that hilltop, nor when he called out to him in the castle of some apostle Griffith can’t even recall now. When Guts was twisting in pain, his brand bleeding and his muscles straining, making a noise like taut leather being stretched at the markets where they sold fox fur and slapped boys like Griffith away, Go beg elsewhere. 

If his body’s heart had stung the way a slap would sting, that was just a body. And a heart, just a heart. There was nothing there.

He clutches his hand near his chest, armored and guarded, impenetrable.

If his body’s heart stings the way a slap would sting, perhaps it is? Perhaps he was wrong. He opens his mouth to breath.

“He’s here,” Irvine says, horned beast and man, his horned bow at the ready.

Griffith looks at him. “Who’s he?”

All members of his army, human and inhuman, look at Griffith. 

They then watch Sonia, in her war robes, her priestess robes, and they don’t watch the princess, not even once.

“Who do you mean?” Griffith asks, his voice rising.

How long has it been since his voice rose like this? Since it rose at all?

“How do you know? How do you know him?”

A hollow, tight muscle rattles at the ribs of the skeleton that is his body. It presses against it, hollow, void, pained. Nervous and hurt, feelings he remembers like memories of old market stalls, of old cobblestoned streets, of bonfire smoke watering his weak, weary eyes and tickling the back of his throat and a smile on the face of that man that was meant just for him.

“You know how,” Zodd says and he spurs his horse on.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Falconia and her armies stand before him. 

Before the two of them. 

Casca on his left, her general’s uniform once again to good use. 

This was, has always been, suicide, a decision he came to quietly at night, while he rid the world of dark creatures and the howling of living beings. 

There’s no way out of this but death. 

His and his own, too. 

But if he can manage to let her live on, then that’ll be enough. Maybe that way he can begin to repay her.

“Y’ready?” he asks her without looking at her.

She answers wordlessly, unsheathing her sword and pointing forward with its newly sharpened tip, a beacon for guidance. Her back is slightly bent, her left foot moves backwards. She’s ready.

None of the soldiers that come at him are cannon fodder.

Powerful, inhuman beings that cut through Schierke’s golems like paper, that rip Farnese’s web of spells as if made by harmless spiders, that put out the fire of her magic and cut down the everreaching vines of Serpico’s weapon, that clash metal sparks and glints of their swords against Casca’s but never seem to get her. Never seem to harm her.

Unease settles in his bone as he notices it’s easy for the two of them to advance as if their paths had been decided long before.

He makes his way closer and closer to the gates of the city in all its glory.

Griffith’s dream calcified, almost risen from beneath the dirt, sprung formed and ancient, a castle that perhaps had always been there, pulled out of the fires of his dream by his own will, his own power.

Guts’ sword cuts through one or two arms, easily, almost ridiculously. Apostles that would’ve taken him hours to take down fall by the wayside as he pushes forward, always the vanguard, always the cannon fodder.

It’s too easy. 

He wants to tell them to retreat, stand back, but he can’t speak. The searing pain of the mark at his back sends shivers down his spine. Cold sweat and thrumming, aching pain, like the reopening of all the wounds he’s incurred since birth, including birth itself, like the shattering and splintering of all his bones into small, sharp fragments that pierce his skin from the inside and rip his organs in tatters. 

He lowers the helmet and the pain becomes worse, not better.

He can no longer see. Dark blood that pooled atop his eyebrows finally drips down into his eyes. Stinging and biting. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t need them to see. He doesn’t need his bones to fight. He doesn’t need his blood to get his revenge.

He knows exactly where he is.

His knees barely hold him up but he knows he’s face to face with the horse on which Griffith is mounted. And if he moves around its neck he can be so close to him it would be a miracle if his head didn’t explode, brains and eyeballs and charred skin and jagged pieces of bone smeared all over the horse’s white fur, all over Griffith’s pristine armor, his white cape.

When he extends out his hand to grab hold of Griffith’s cape--he knows exactly where it is--it’s not sturdy fabric that he finds but the feeling of another hand.

“You’re here,” a voice says.

It is and it isn’t a voice he knows.

It is and it isn’t a man he loved.

It is and it isn’t the sky, the seas, the grass, the trees, the air, the earth.

  
  


He couldn’t have imagined death would feel like this. No one ever could.

  
  
  


-

“Why did you do this?” the princess screams, her face distorted. 

She crawls on the quaking ground--the sound of thunder roaring beneath her feet--and she tries salvaging the tattered rag that was her dress from the hands of the dead rising from the dirt, their long nails cutting through the fabric, slicing open her white, smooth skin. Blood burbles out and it’s nothing like poets write, roses blooming, it’s the gushing of hot red liquid, metallic in its taste even just from smell. She scratches at her own face but is unable to slice her skin open and leaves only reddish trails in the shape of her fingers. She pleads with him. She begs. She asks why.

The dead cannot be killed. They cannot be hurt. They feel no pain and no remorse and nothing but resentment for the living who carried on after they left and showed no compassion for their fierce suffering, their endless misery. They’re pushed back by Apostles and humans alike but those are living beings and there’s nothing in Hell that’s more despised than flesh and the shadows it’s able to cast upon the Earth.

In this limitless place there’s no more shadows. There’s no more flesh. It’s all consumed into the gaping mouths of the dead. 

There’s a still, stagnant silent where Griffith thought he’d hear howling cries.

“There was no other way,” Griffith whispers to the princess but nothing of her remains, consumed wholly by the dead, torn to pieces by their evergrowing teeth. The dead whose path he opened, whose arrival he welcomed.

Guts stumbles forward amidst a group of them, lost and staggering, as if he didn’t know that he’s supposed to be a cannibal, an eater of lives, a fleshless, shadowless body that’s been summoned to establish Hell on this land.

Out of focus, Griffith finds him, almost blurry, but a movement of his hand and the sea of the dead parts for him, a straight line connecting the hill on which he stands and the plain on which Guts is lost, having climbed out of the earth with the rest of the dead, falling upon the living like a sleepy blanket of snow.

He walks to him.

He walks to him.

They walk to each other.

They who have killed each other and lived for each other and loved each other and would kill each other again if they possibly could.

Brother, killer, lover.

Guts reaches out his hand to him and Griffith takes it, just as he did before he killed him when Guts came to get him here in this city.

(One giant eye opened in darkness)

(There’s no time here, Griffith knows)

(His form still the Falcon of Light, the body received, consumed, birthed)

(One giant eye opened and adjusted its pupil focused on him)

(One giant mouth in darkness spoke)

(Is this really what you want?)

(No time exists here)

(Griffith nodded)

(One giant eye closed and there was more darkness)

(One giant mouth, lips and teeth, smiled)

(So be it)

The Earth underneath their feet trembles, soft and humid, ripples its fleshy slopes, pulsates with newformed veins and swollen skin, limbs and eyes and formless shapes disguised in human skin, made of human skin, disguised in human heads, made of human heads, and from this ocean of skin and organs and limbs and the viscous, liquid squelch of blood and guts, and from this formless land made flesh they rise, four fingers of a hand.

Former comrades.

They come for him.

In Guts’ hand he places his dagger, the one he keeps at his boot and never uses.

He touches the burnt skin on Guts’ face and leans into him, to whisper in his ear.

“Once they strip me, drive this through my neck.”

Guts is fleshless, shadowless, but he can hold onto the dagger, and he can feel the touch of Griffith’s gloved fingers. He cannot reply and he doesn’t even nod.

Still, in this edge, in this liminal space, they both know.

Darkness swallows them and the dead and the living that have been consumed and the buildings that have yet to be destroyed and the land and the grass and the sky and the air and the earth.

It’s not the absence of light, now that the Falcon is gone, it’s too much of it searing the gelatinous consistency of eyeballs, rising like burning tears and acid reflux, waves swallowing the shape of everything that can be known, that can be seen, that can be named.

At least this way Guts cannot see his broken body. 

He too was fleshless before he died, a skeleton missing patches of skin, scorched and voiceless, tendons broken at the base of his legs, in his knees, bones splintered and shaved down to nothing, to mere ornaments, organs failed and punctured, gathering rotting liquid.

His body, his own now, the one he used to have, the one he loved Guts with, collapses. 

He drops soundlessly, feels more bones breaking, his head lolls to one side in this light, in this darkness. There’s fumbling, he feels it above him, and hands that hesitate and touch, soft but rough, knowing but unknowing, familiar and strange. And then there’s tenderness. Guts is straddling his body. He feels the motion of Guts’ arms lifting the dagger, both his hands surely at its hilt, and when he brings them down to pierce right through his exposed throat and even wherever it is he is lying on, it comes down with the sound of a bell, tolling through time, through eternity, so far back there’s nothing but primordial, primeval, desire and hatred, nothing Griffith recognizes even though he cannot see, even though no one can see anymore.

They fall. Together.

The world will forget them. 

No centuries needed, in but a few years, legend will give way to myth and myth to lies and in no time no one will ever utter his name again, not Falcon, that one will carry on, its own being now, a separate thing, but Griffith. No one will ever even mumble it. And no one will ever utter Guts’.

He couldn’t have imagined death would feel like this. No one ever could.

And now, like this, finally. Now like this they can be together.

**Author's Note:**

> things have been lol bad but ill try pickin back up esp w taking it all the right way
> 
> thank u for readin !!!!


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